Yusmeiro Petit and Juan Perez: Finding the Better Baseball! Moment

On Sunday, the Giants and the Royals played Game 5 of the World Series, and an unusual thing happened. We’ll get to that. On Saturday, the same teams played Game 4, and in the bottom of the fourth inning, Yusmeiro Petit batted for some reason against Jason Vargas. Petit swung at the first pitch, maybe trying to catch the Royals off guard, as if the Royals even had a plan for effectively pitching to Yusmeiro Petit, who is a reliever. The bat hit the baseball and the baseball found the outfield grass. Remarked Andy McCullough:

“Baseball!” is the exclamation of those who understand that they’ll never understand the game. It’s an acknowledgment and an appreciation of the random by the learned, and classic Baseball! moments serve to underscore that there’s always a chance of anything, and baseball has a lot of repetitions. Weird things don’t usually happen, but there are enough events that the next one might be right around the corner. I mentioned that something strange happened yesterday, too. Madison Bumgarner didn’t need the help, but in the bottom of the eighth, Juan Perez faced Wade Davis and drilled a ball off the very top of the center-field fence for an RBI double. Perez is a player well-known for nothing and best-known for running better outfield routes than Michael Morse and Travis Ishikawa. Responded one David Cameron:

Basically, Cameron was calling it a Baseball! moment. So, which was the better Baseball! moment?

Some points need to be understood. Let’s start with Petit. There’s nothing crazy about his having faced Jason Vargas. Vargas is neither a good pitcher nor a bad one. He’s just a guy to whom things happen, close enough to being league-average that you needn’t think about his distinguishing characteristics. It’s the Petit part that makes this insane. According to our leaderboards, since 1900, there are 1,865 pitchers who have batted at least 100 times. Here are the worst-hitting pitchers, by wOBA:

  1. Ron Herbel, .055
  2. Vicente Palacios, .056
  3. Don Carman, .058
  4. Yusmeiro Petit, .062
  5. Tom Koehler, .066

Pretty much every pitcher sucks, but Petit sucks even by pitchers-hitting standards. He has a .085 career BABIP, but it’s the sort of .085 BABIP that doesn’t indicate bad luck. He entered with five hits, all singles. Of his 54 balls in play, 42 have been grounders. Behold, Yusmeiro Petit finding room in an outfield with Alex Gordon, Jarrod Dyson, and Lorenzo Cain in it.

vargaspetit1

vargaspetit2

All right, now for Perez vs. Davis. Perez, as you’ve come to learn, is essentially a defensive replacement. He’s good at that part of his job, but his career slugging percentage is barely .300. He owns a .255 wOBA, and he projects, according to Steamer, for a relatively glowing .281 wOBA, that is still a bad wOBA. Perez has two home runs to his name, and the way Giants people talk about him, when he’s hitting it’s almost as if it’s a pitcher hitting. Davis, meanwhile, is superhuman. This season, he allowed a .179 slugging percentage, which is a slugging percentage that begins with a 1. Baseball-Reference has slugging data going back to 1957. Since then, setting a minimum of 50 innings, here are the best single-season slugging percentages against:

As a reliever, Davis is stupid good. You could think of him as turning the average hitter into something even worse than Juan Perez. Behold, heroics:

davisperez1

davisperez2

This has been an extremely long build-up to some pretty simple math. The question regards Baseball! moments. Which can we say was more unlikely: Yusmeiro Petit getting a hit against Jason Vargas, or Juan Perez getting an extra-base hit against Wade Davis?

Understand, please, that we have to approximate. We don’t perfectly know true-talent levels, so what you’ll see below has unwritten error bars. If the numbers are close, we can say the events were similarly improbable. If the numbers aren’t close, we can say one was probably more unlikely than the other.

There are a couple of approaches, here. One uses the Odds Ratio Method. The other uses this conveniently-timed Community blog post! I’m going through both methods. First, we’ll go through Petit vs. Vargas. I have little choice but to use Petit’s career hitting numbers, and I can’t imagine he’s really much different from what those indicate. For Vargas, I used both his 2014 statistics, and I used his Steamer projection. I’m ignoring the platoon split, here, because I can’t be bothered. I’m also ignoring any park factors, because I also can’t be bothered. Using Vargas’ 2014 numbers, the Odds Ratio Method spits out a hit probability of about 5.3%. Using his projection, the ORM spits out a hit probability of about 5.1%. The method from the Community post spits out a hit probability of about 6.1%. All right, pretty fair agreement. We’re looking at, roughly, 5-6%. Which makes sense, since that’s basically Petit’s career at the plate to date.

Now for Perez vs. Davis. Some more options, here. We can look at Perez’s brief career, and Davis’ 2014. We can look at Perez’s brief career, and Davis’ career as a reliever. We can look at Perez’s projection, and Davis’ career as a reliever. Sadly, we don’t have a Wade Davis extra-base-hit projection, but we can manage. Following, a table of extra-base-hit probabilities. Note that, again, I’m ignoring the handedness factor, even though Perez was batting right-handed against Davis, which makes things all the more challenging. This year, against righties, Davis allowed a .298 OPS. Read that as many times as you want. It’s never not going to sound ridiculous.

Perez Davis Odds Ratio XBH% Community XBH%
Career 2014 1.7% 2.5%
Career Career, RP 3.8% 4.0%
Projection Career, RP 3.9% 4.3%

We get, more or less, a probability in the 2-4% range. Which is lower than the probability range we got for Petit vs. Vargas. So we can say with some confidence that Juan Perez clubbing an extra-base hit off Wade Davis was less likely than Yusmeiro Petit getting any kind of hit against Jason Vargas, even though Petit is arguably the worst hitter in the history of the sport. So framed exactly like that, the Perez double gets the mathematical nod as the better Baseball! moment, in a month that’s been seemingly filled with them.

There are, of course, better potential Baseball! moments. One of them — maybe the most extreme of them — would feature Yusmeiro Petit clubbing an extra-base hit against Wade Davis. It looks like that ship has sailed, as far as this World Series is concerned, but then, on the other hand, baseball’s gonna baseball. The odds aren’t zero. Not all the way to the end.





Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.

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tz
9 years ago

If you throw in the fact that Perez had only recently found out about the passing of his friend Oscar Taveras, it makes this even way more unbelievable.

bh
9 years ago
Reply to  tz

not necessarily, it may have taken away any nerves that he may have coming into that at bat…sometimes when you care a little less about a situation is when it works out for you.

tz
9 years ago
Reply to  bh

Good point. The narrative may have gotten a bump up, but I agree the degree of difficulty could have gone either way.